The Last of Us (Part) 2 [PS4]

It's a great game graphic and gameplay wise and a great improvement over part I in those areas. Story is a mixed bag. It is depressing from start to finish, and overall not as good as the first one. But IMHO still very good.
Should point out, that I had lot on my head while playing part II and felt, that it is additional emotional burden.

 

Yes it will destroy your memories. I seriously advise you not to play it. I see TLOU2 as non-canonical. It's the most disappointing game for me (and many others). It's worse than the last season of Game of thrones.

On its own it's a great game but it's not the continuation of Ellie and Joël story. It's just others characters stories with Ellie and Joël used as a stepping-stone for the others stories

 

@jayco I would play it if I was you. I thought TLOU was very good too and TLOU2 is a very good game. You should just understand that TLOU2 is Naughty Dog's story to tell and you should enjoy that game(whatever the outcome).

However if you looking to playing as Ellie and Joel and continue that story, then you might not like it.

Graphically and gameplay wise, the game is really good imo.

 

Spoiler

I so totally don't see it that way. It was a total continuation of Joel and Ellies story - one wracked with sadness with the outcome of their actions, doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons, seemingly punished for it, and one who isn't mature enough to realise, or accept, that the result of those actions could give them a home and happiness that is in such short supply in this broken world. And when they do realise what it is that they have lost they are too lost in their anger at themselves to stop and think about other people's feelings or needs.

@jayco - if you liked the story on the first one, the story you were being told then this one is even better. But you have to invest to understand why things are the way they are. It's really hard to describe without spoiling it, because it's a game about emotions and just describing them pulls the wind from their sails.

 

I'd skip it. It turns out Ellie is actually a clicker and Joel was a dog wearing a disguise. It ruins the whole first game.

 

It's very much a mixed bag. The graphics are astonishing, with the kind of attention to detail that can only be attained by crushing the spirits of artists with 80 hour work weeks for 7 years.

The gameplay is solid, with AI that behaves in an engaging and varied enough of a capacity for you to have quite different playthroughs of the same section. This, by way of instant loading, is something that will really shine on the PS5, as there are some really great bits of level design dotted throughout the game. Although I find the need to scavenge for supplies means I'm always apprehensive about spending any of my resources.

But then there's the part of TLoU that everyone really cares about: the story. There are elements that are interesting and well done, but, on the whole, I think it's quite poor. Not nearly the travesty that certain vocal portions of the internet have made it out to be, but just ever so slightly shit.

Structure is mucked about with, in my opinion, to use complexity to create the illusion of depth. There is a very straightforward, linear story contained within this game, but the desperate need to elevate it to *dons beret* art *removes beret* strikes me as the main reason for its bloated storytelling, and the contrived nature of its non linear structure.

The story could have been half the length, just as deep, and imbued with greater emotional resonance by seeking to be emotive rather than clever. As it is, they presented a simple story in a complex manner; with a lot of superfluous elements.

Note that this flies in the face of the subdued, mature simplicity of the first game's story, but fits with the critical acclaim heaped upon it. Gaming media is chock full of illiterate morons, many of whom failed to realise that they were so impressed by TLoU1's story not because it was a particularly groundbreaking story, but because a simple story was told in a mature fashion, and treated its audience as capable, thinking adults.

It seems that Neil Druckman was a victim of his own success, maybe moreso his own hype. Better luck to him next time.

As for whether this game will ruin your memories of the first... possibly. I don't like any of the Alien movies as much as the first, but none of them spoil the first (although Prometheus comes close!) I also think the only decent Star Wars content is the original trilogy, but don't let the differently atrocious prequel and sequel trilogies spoil the original for me.

With that context established, I can safely say that TLoU2 exists in a similar capacity. It doesn't fundamentally spoil the one that I like, but it certainly doesn't enhance it, and it may just tarnish it a little.

 

We're excited to share that all of our PS4 games will be backwards compatible on #PS5

, including: The Last of Us Part II, The Last of Us Remastered, Uncharted 4, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Uncharted 1 - 3, and the Jak series!

 

Haha a loudness and power consumption comparison between PS5 PS4 pro PS4 running those games would be interesting

 

Here you go folks

 

Very interesting the new patch seemed to be linked to PS5 but improve a lot loading on PS4 with HDD and SSD.



Same for TLOU resmastered


Here only 13 second 86 with the patch to launch a new game against 1 minutes 30 before patch.

 

This is a crazy improvement. I can only assume this is the result of revisiting old code with new I/O optimisation tools designed for PS5 devs.

 

Fabian Giesen of RAD tool games said out of the SSD the I/O code was probably not very optimised.

 

This does suggest that loads time in some games has been slower than they otherwise needs to be for much of this generation. TLoU may not be a great example because it is a port of a last gen game but when you look at the load times of Ghost of Tsushima, something is up.

 

But TLOU 2 seems to have faster loading too maybe someone will do a video

 

Indeed, if you don't want to making loading times a priority, then yea, it can totally suck.

 

The TLOU DLC also got an update. Nice! v1.05

 

It's not just TLOU/TLOU2 that got an update. GoW v1.34, Spider-man v1.18, GoW 3 Remastered v1.02 also got an update. Uncharted, inFamous Second Son and HZD didn't though.

 

Developers are really wizards

 

Nah. Its more like we're seeing what devs can do when given the time and not being forced to move on to something else to meet aggressive deadlines.

 

maybe someone is just looking more closer at some code and fixed something, now Im getting ready to release a demo, so are reviewing stuff, FWIW about a week ago
I was looking at my code where it loads any txt files, seems like I was performing an unnecessary data validation step in there
removing it improved game startup time from ~5.5secs to 2 secs!!! gah over the last 3-4 years I have prolly started the game up 10s of thousands of times (Im not exaggerating) the problem is 5 secs is not long enuf so like Im twidling the fingers so I wasnt too concerned but now Im like how many hours have I wasted waiting